“We are what we eat.” I don’t mean the phrase literally, for I hope I’m not in the company of cannibals! Rather, just as Gandhi said that the character of a civilization can be deduced from its treatment of animals, I believe our treatment of the animals we eat has moral and religious significance for each of us.
I planned this sermon to give consideration to one voice in our congregation who has been a long and ardent advocate for stopping the slaughter of animals. I’m surprised where my engagement with a prophetic voice has led me. I want to talk about three things today: the role of animals in religion; our current relations with animals; and what our faith can teach us about building right relations with animals.
Animals and Religion --- Animals are deeply embedded in our religious traditions. They are protagonists in some of the most profound stories. Recall the wily snake in the Garden of Eden and the whale that swallowed Jonah. For many centuries humans have sacrificed animals in their religious practice, offering up their bodies and blood as gifts to the deities. Even today many of us partake of meat like Easter lamb to mark religious holidays.
Our killing and eating of animals have forever haunted the religious imagination. Many have difficulty squaring the notion of a perfect creator with the hard fact that much of the world is consumed with killing and eating other creatures. As William Alcott lamented 200 years ago: The world sometimes seems to me like one mighty slaughterhouse—one grand school for the suppression of every kind and tender and brotherly feeling.
In response, deeply embedded in many religious traditions, is the notion that there once was and perhaps one day will be a better world where humans and animals will stop slaughtering and eating each other. Pythagoras, the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, described: The golden age. . . . When no men tainted their lips with blood, and birds went flying safely through air, and in the fields the rabbits wandered unfrightened, and no little fish was ever hooked by its own credulity.
Our Relations with Animals ---I want to confess that the seed for this sermon was planted years ago with a bad joke. I was on a committee planning a blessing of the animals service. When asked what we should do after the service I piped up and said, “let’s have a bar-b-que.” There was stunned silence that felt like instant excommunication.
But there lies the rub. Our society lavishes love and resources on a few favored species we call pets. Yet, we turn around and consume large quantities of animals slaughtered on our behalf. Many of these animals—cows, pigs, and poultry—have brains, communications skills, and social systems—that are comparable to those of the animals that we treat as our honored pets.
Indulge me in a thought experiment. Envision your favorite animal. For me it is Smokey the cat, who was in my family through childhood. She was a wise and proud creature, a cunning hunter and doting mother. She allowed me to pour out my love and fears as I gave her “scritchings” as we sat together. She lives on today in stories of her exploits that I tell my son.
Now imagine your beloved animal snatched away from its mother within a week of birth, well before weaning. Imagine her tail, teeth and genitals being cut out without anesthesia. Imagine that she never gets outside in fresh air her whole life, but lives in wire pens that cut her feet. Imagine that she is fed a diet that promotes rapid and profitable growth, but ravages her digestive system. Imagine that she must sleep in her excrement and lives cooped up with fellow creatures driven mad by the stresses of being so tightly packed in these cages. Imagine that your beloved animal is shipped without water or food to a slaughterhouse where she faces a real possibility of being hacked apart while still conscious. I’ve just described to you the life of the animals we encounter on our supermarket shelves and in our restaurants. Not the most pleasant of guided meditations, I’m afraid.Building Right Relations with Animals --- Unitarian-Universalists creatively adapt ideas from the world’s religions and other sources. I want to highlight a few currents of thought that may be helpful in building a model of right relations with animals.
There is the notion that all living things have souls. This premise runs though many religious traditions and it may be part of your theology. In the words of Pythagoras: The soul comes and goes, shifts residence from beasts to men, from men to beasts, but always it keeps on living. Do not drive out by impious slaughter what be kindred souls. Let not life be fed on life.
We can learn from the first precept of Hinduism and Buddhism, namely, compassion for all living things.
Like many Jews and Christians, Unitarian-Univeralists are too darned impatient to wait to die to get to heaven. So we devote our lives to building heaven here on earth. This vision and practice have prompted many to renounce killing animals as inconsistent with the achievement of a better, more Edenic world.
Science has come a long way since Descartes argued that animals are soulless machines that feel no real pain. Science now has a more nuanced view of animals and their language, social structures, tool making skills, and capacity for feeling pain, both physical and psychological.
Finally, Unitarian-Universalists have been very active breaking down arbitrary barriers of race, gender, and sexual orientation using the language of rights. Surely, the momentum of those struggles should propel us to consider giving animals basic rights against being mistreated and killed.
Yes, we can argue how different animals are from people. But we still grant rights to people—the retarded, infants, and the demented—whose intellectual and moral abilities have fallen way below the human norm. And we lavish resources and rights on some animals—our pets. As Unitarian-Universalists we should recognize all that we share with animals and protect all of them from being mistreated and killed.
I am inspired by the example of Henry Bergh, a Unitarian who over a century ago founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. After that he became the driving force in the movement to give legal and other protections to children caught in abusive families. His life demonstrates that compassion and a sense of justice can and should extend to all living creatures, human and non-human alike.
My personal model of right relations with animals is that we should not injure or kill animals for fun, food or profit. Our respect for the interdependent web of life, one of our faith’s fundamental principles, should inspire us to oppose the butchering of creation.
When I started this sermon process, I never thought that I would reach such an absolutist position. I anticipated a sermon that would be palatable to all and hard on none. But I have been prompted to change as a result of my engagement with a prophetic voice from among us. I no longer can live the fiction that the flesh we eat is just another inert product, like toothpaste or chewing gum. Meat eating once may have been a necessity for our hard-pressed ancestors. But we live in a consumer society with a plethora of food choices. Is there sufficient moral justification today for the killing of literally billions of animals each year for human fun, profit and pleasure? The best instincts of our Unitarian-Universalist religious tradition call on us to wrestle with that question and be prepared to change the way we live.
I acknowledge real doubts about my conclusion. There may be a primal connection of love and respect between predator and prey. I worry there is a certain prideful asceticism at work in the animal rights movement. When someone says “I had a great time at a Brazilian BBQ last night,” I don’t want to be the reproachful super-ego saying, “No, you shouldn’t have.” My own adherence to a vegetarian path is incomplete. Please be understanding if you find me muttering religious incantations over a half-devoured Italian beef sandwich—I’m still working through this issue. I can envision a way a life where humans and animals interact directly and compassionately; where meat eating is part of a collaboration between humans and animals and not the kind of brutal exploitation that prevails today. In short, there is room here for healthy debate and self-examination and many different outcomes.
Yet, we live today in a world where living, sentient beings are systematically brutalized, killed and commoditized into slabs of meat under cellophane. Let each of us look clearly at the consequences of our actions. Let’s draw on our resources of compassion to establish right relations with the creatures with whom we share this precious earth.
Blessed be.